just take a breath and sing to it when all the day is done
by starinhercorner
Summary: "/She'd felt him./ She stayed in bed for hours afterward, meditated for hours more—skipped meetings and missions, ate every few days, spoke in fragments of answers. She remembers how much Conner hated it." Post-series snippet. (Mentions of character death.)


**A/N: YJ!Martians typically live up to 200 ****_Earth(!) years_**** and ****_can_**** live up to 300, according to Weisman. Let that sink in. Or,****_ don't_****, for your own sake. It will ruin your life.**

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She talked out loud to Kaldur in her sleep the third night after he'd passed in his, hairline receded like the tide from a life of stress and pressure. They drifted through Shayeris in all its light, bright and humble as Kaldur himself, and for the hundred apologies she gave for a twenty-year-old transgression, he gave a hundred pardons. She woke with hands webbed and eyes white, hopeless to ever match the color of his, and breathed shakily with gills fluttering against her pillow. Conner wove his arms around her, expertly, and pressed his forehead into the back of her neck, but the tears he braced her for never came. _She'd felt him._ She stayed in bed for hours afterward, meditated for hours more—skipped meetings and missions, ate every few days, spoke in fragments of answers.

She remembers how much Conner hated it.

Conner hated that she started lighting candles, one for every person they'd lost, even though she made sure to never use her hands with him looking. He hated all the programs she started watching on the afterlife, on haunted houses and people who called themselves "psychics," all the thoughts it put in her head of potential her powers didn't have. He made her drag him along with her one night through underwater caverns, around the back alleys of Gotham, and under the bleachers of Happy Harbor High. Even with his hand in hers, he scowled the whole way. They stood at the foot of her mental Mount Justice and when he wouldn't let her go inside, they argued until it fell and the rubble matched real life. They argued more about how she was hurting herself than they ever did about how she had been hurting others—though the experience had made them better fighters, the territory that came with being at odds with each other already having been navigated and mapped. They'd go to bed with the cable disconnected, fall asleep with their backs to each other to the sound of static—though she'd always block it out and listen to his breathing instead. She never told him that she'd use it to steady her own before starting the search through her mind again. He would have hated that, too. He would have held his breath. He was stubborn like that.

Their Team had brought production and distribution of Kobra Venom to a global standstill, but that didn't stop derivatives and new compounds altogether from leaking onto the market. People always found their new addictions, their new ways to get power. And missions with the freshmen usually ended with the last-resort explosives detonating without a proper heads-up but _this one_, this one the warning had come in clear, and over the psychic link no less—she'll never pretend to have had an excuse.

She just remembers trying to think about how she could get closer, because the warehouse reminded her of the first time they'd used the psychic link on a mission, and leaving the bedroom at all made her feel like she needed to cast herself out further to find the Team's lost ones. Their minds, their spirits, their _somethings_ left of them had to be somewhere, released from their physical forms but not—not extinguished, never extinguished.

Conner didn't take her back right away after pulling her from the fire. She woke up in a small clearing with his hands digging into her shoulders, and he shook her so hard that the nausea sent acid up her throat. He was angry. Her limbs were still liquid but when he nearly screamed that she had to _let them go_, Artemis and Kaldur and everyone else who was gone; that she was never going to find them anywhere again because they were _dead_, she punched him hard enough in the mouth to cut his lower lip open on his teeth. She was angrier, and the dehydration and the hunger made him a misty haze in her eyes, already calling her back into dark, empty waters. She remembers though, very clearly, how the hands holding her torso up from the ground slowly moved to support her head and back, and how he brought the corner of her jaw up to his bloodied lips and kissed it. She was already choking on a sob and he was, too, when he asked her if she'd be the way she was then after _his_ death—because if so, he needed to find a way to become immortal for her, but the problem was that there wasn't a way, so in all his honesty he had absolutely no idea what to do.

There wasn't a way. That hung in the air a long time despite how muffled his voice was against her neck. She remembers her tears rolling into her ears of all places; she laughs about that sometimes, in a way that almost brings them back to her eyes. She doesn't quite remember his tears—they must have soaked into her collar, where there was already so much sweat—but he hiccuped once in a way that sounded like a whole heart popping, and she rolled her head to the side and let it bump his. He held her until their newest Robin got the radio comm-link working again and young, scared, exhilarated voices bombarded their ears; at that point, they were still so new to being leaders, and had so much work to do. She kept her eyes open for him even as he piloted the Bio-Ship and she rested in the back, and didn't close them until they were all the way home.

The smoke stayed in his lungs for days. She buried all her candles in the ground and threw away her matches. He couldn't decide if he wanted to claim that as his goal all along or promise that the coughing wasn't her fault; frustration with the fact that no matter what he said he was only making her feel worse turned his face as red as the cough drops. It was sweet. She cried fervently. They bedded themselves at eight o'clock every night and fell asleep to the few old movies about the ocean they could find that didn't end with gnawed-off limbs. She woke at the sporadic bouncing of his chest with her head on his heart then fell back asleep within seconds. She set alarms for sunrise.


End file.
